Christopher Schmidt

So, earlier today the Jetta broke down. Jess took it to the shop and got a rental, blah blah blah.

Jana came over (yay jana) and chilled out for a while. I gave her a ride to sa meeting at 7:30, with a promise from her she would be back so I could sit over her shoulder and help her get started on her graphics project.

She did, and around midnight, when I was ready to take her home, I started looking for the key.

And looking for it.

And looking for it.

After spending 30 minutes and not finding it, I finally gave up, walked her back over to Harvard, and came back here.

And looked.

And Looked.

And finally found it...

... In Jess's tote bag, right where I'd gotten it from in the first place.

Yes, I spent 3 hours in the middle of the night slowly panicing over a lost rental car key -- to the point that I tried to call the shop to see if I could get a spare (no answer) -- only to find out that I'd already put the key away.

And now I'm tired, and cranky, and have gotten almost nothing of what I wanted to tonight done. There is one exception to this: we got SDLRoads movedd off sourceforge and onto Google Code -- which means it is in SVN now, and that we have a sane set of tools for managing the project.

Regardless of anything else that went wrong this evening, at least I was able to chat up some old friends and move a long-practically dead project out of death and into a spot where it's usable again.

Maybe I'm missing something, but that sounds as if it wasn't possible to put SDLRoads into SVN as long as it was on SourceForge, which makes me wonder because SF do offer SVN as well as CVS. (Or did last I checked. Perhaps it's not as usable as you'd like or something?)

That was probably unclear. There were a couple of problems with Sourceforge that I didn't like:

* Less easy to use in general. It feels like a 'web 1.0' app vs. a 'web 2.0 app' kind of difference. * Slow, hard to navigate. (This contributes to the above) * Issue tracker was hard to figure out. (I've never had luck with it.) * No wiki

All of these would have been reasonably okay if I ha been able to just click a button to convert to SVN -- but I couldn't. I had to upload an svndump formatted dump of the code! So that meant I had to get the code out, import it into a seperate svn, then use the seperate svn to dump the data out, and upload that back to sourceforge.

At that point, I abandoned Sourceforge. Google Code is easy to manage, easy to navigate, and easy to use, and offers all the things I actually cared about.

(They do have a wiki now for projects to use, but that capability is not advertised very well.)

I knew that it was possible to convert CVS repositories to SVN, but didn't know how. Hearing that you have to supply them with an appropriately-formatted dump doesn't completely surprise me, I suppose.

Apparently, in the past, they actually let you convert it directly on their servers, but it "caused too many problems", which is what led to the current 'state of the art' way of simply creating your own cvs2svn setup.

It wasn't clear to me if there was some way to turn on SVN access *without* this for an existing project: if it had been trivial to turn on SVN and just check in a tarball, I might have done that...

But really, I've liked Google Code much better. One of my personal favorite features is the fact that the wiki is actually checked into SVN -- so you can be sure you can get all your content out for reformatting/redistribution in a trivial fashion. (I *really* like it.)

There's also the vague "Sourceforge isn't Open Source" thing that has bugged me since shortly after starting the SDLRoads project.

In short, SourceForge didn't really offer me anything that I couldn't get in a fashion I was more comfortable with elsewhere, and that's what *really* led the change.

I'm glad you found it! Finding it in a stupid place is better than not finding it at all, right? Thanks for helping me last night and for walking me home :)I just found a ray tracing book at the science library...I'm going to go check it out now. Things are looking up :)